Below are two useful apps that allow students to engage in creative activities through building and experimenting with Lego bricks.These apps are easy to use and students will definitely enjoy working on them. They are also compatible with Chromebooks.

To educators who embrace new technologies wholeheartedly, digital devices are a powerful tool for creating an engaged and individualized educational experience. To those that are a little more hesitant, digital devices seem more like a quick route to Instagram and Facebook — that is, to distractions that interfere with the educational experience, rather than boosting it.

Excellent article that gives educators some additional ways to incorporate digital devices into the curriculum. The author also explains ways to get around using these devices as well. You have probably heard of learning styles. Did you know there was such a thing as a "distraction style?"

You've heard some good stuff about the maker movement such as how making helps students learn through embodied cognition, creates a mindset that's empowering, and builds creative confidence. You're interested in crafting some maker lessons but don't know where to start or how to do something that works in your classroom. Or perhaps you're worried that you don't have time to do a long, involved project. How do you still teach the Common Core or cover the required curriculum? These simple steps will get you started.

When Jay Jaboneta heard that a group of children in the Philippines have to swim to school, he started a fundraiser on Facebook to buy them a boat—only to realize that the solution required a more local perspective.

Jay Jaboneta’s story isn’t like most of the fundraising charity stories that I often see and share on my newsfeed. Seeing that it was a Facebook featured story, I was expecting it to be another case of social media charity. You know the type. It goes from a sob story to a happily ever after all thanks to the amazing power of online social networking and advocacy. These often come with a picture of a child and their new shoes/books/clothes/school, etc that were donated thanks to the supportive people who ‘liked’ the cause.

Yes, it started out typical with the efforts to buy a boat for the community, but it didn’t stop with that. I was very impressed with the video’s emphasis on the limits of this charitable act and the switch to thinking long-term and local. Instead of top-down charity, Jaboneta switched to a bottom-up perspective that switched his efforts towards fostering local education through college scholarships for highschool students.

However, given that it is only a 3 minute video, it left a lot of questions unanswered. Why did they focus only on the kids and not the rest of the community? What were the children doing in the middle of the video with the plants that they tied together? Was this child labor? Can these kids even make it though highschool to get the college scholarships? Why do those families live in that area in the first place and is the government doing anything about it?

Nevertheless, this video serves the same purpose as most other short videos in our current digital age. It gives us a small dose of interesting material to suit our attention span and then gives us the opportunity to search for more of the same topic on the internet.

Yellow Boat of Hope @YellowBoat

We are the @YellowBoat of Hope Foundation, Inc. We ferry kids to school. Like us on Facebook

10 of the best Raspberry Pi projects for kids: How to teach kids to code ... PC Advisor This is a really cool project carried out by a Dad with his son: making a mini beast habitat fit for an insect, complete with connected camera via Raspberry Pi.

When so many new technologies promise to transform education - what role is left to the teacher? Why is the teacher still important? This powerful clip effectively presents compelling arguments for the importance of teaching students in a 'social' classroom setting - with reference to 'how' students learn; making the best of all types of tools to aid what goes on 'in the student's head'.

Raspberry Pi is becoming more and more popular in education every day, but how can unfamiliar teachers begin using this technology in their work? Laura Dixon - Raspberry Pi expert, head of Computing at Royal High School and Computing At School author - was kind enough to answer some questions on the matter.

"Instead of listing all the different ways a task deviates from the target, the single-point rubric simply describes the target in a single column of traits."

Jim Lerman's insight: Interesting idea, but I think using this technique to develop an actual rubric might be better. As in this case, start with statements about level 3, which represents attainment of the standard. Then, to the right, elaborate on examples of advanced performance, and to the left, examples of performance needing improvement.

I think this is an interesting idea worth tinkering with. Perhaps though it would be better to list the criteria for a 3 or meets standard and let the students describe what would be short of standard or exceeding standard. Perhaps even letting them submit a completed rubric with their rationale and descriptions of why they hit, missed or exceeded in certain areas.

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